


so I wait for you like a lonely house

by lilith_morgana



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Origin Story, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-16
Updated: 2019-06-12
Packaged: 2019-08-24 13:52:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16641399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilith_morgana/pseuds/lilith_morgana
Summary: They remain the same; they break all the rules. A brief history of Sereda Aeducan and Gorim Saelac through the ages.





	1. Stone

_Love is so short, forgetting is so long_  
**Pablo Neruda**  
  
  
***  
  
  
She puts her blade to his throat and he chuckles; he pummels her with his shield and when their eyes meet over it, she grins. Shoulder to shoulder in the Assembly, in the Provings, up against the warm stone walls of the Royal Palace during another endless ceremonial gathering. Their world that is always two separate worlds, each part carefully kept from the other. Orzammar does that to many of them, she knows.  
  
They all inhabit each other down here and there are important distinctions to be made under those circumstances.  
  
There’s an alphabet of looks, of touches, of neutral words that burn under the skin.

There’s an alphabet of _them_ and she learns it as a parallel to the signs and letters the tutors make her decipher. A better language, suited for everyday purposes.  
  
Words for _sod this lesson get me out of here_ , for forbidden jokes and degrading remarks about her brothers or his fellow knights or the long-winded men and women of the Assembly. Words that speak of sword training and dueling down in the commons, of supplies and improvements and runes, _all_ the runes in Thedas. There in between the silverite and dweomer runes lies a message of _later, somewhere safe_ . And Gorim tells her about darkspawn sightings, the long-lost thaigs, the latest gossip from the tavern and all she hears is _can’t wait, my lady_ .  
  
There are glances that run like the deep roads beneath everything else.  
  
Glances that mean that she’s thinking about him, that he’s missing her, that out of all the people down here he’s the only one besides her father that she truly trusts.  
  
A a gesture, just out of sight and small enough not to get them into trouble. Barely even a _motion_ , barely anything but for his way of placing his hand against her shield as he walks by her or stands by her side. Such a light touch, his palm ghosting over the unflinching veridium but it never fails to bring a smile to her lips.  
  
There are other gestures, of course. Cruder ones, more daring and likely to get them both into trouble with her brothers, but this is the one she treasures the most. Just one small touch.  
  
“I’m with you as always, my lady,” he says and his voice rumbles in her chest.  
  
  
  
*  


The first time they meet she’s a chubby girl with short braids and a pet nug smuggled into the palace. Gorim is three years older, already broad of shoulder as he’s watching her from across the room when their fathers speak of armies and breaches, darkspawn and trenches. Sereda makes a grimace, trying to catch the older boy’s attention.  
  
Solemnly he just stands there, already a warrior in all but age and experience. Already in service. There’s something unsettling about that thought, her child mind still too free for boundaries, her body terrified to consider its future limitations. For a little while longer she is allowed to run across the bridges and up the stairs, run like a mating bronto into the great halls now that mother isn’t around to sweep her up in a stern embrace and lecture her about manners.  
  
“This is Amgarrak,” Sereda says and holds up the half-terrified mud splasher. It makes a few muffled grunts into her armpit.  
  
The boy from across the room steps closer, looks at her properly and then eventually just when she thinks he’ll tell her father about the nug he takes a few steps closer, his grin wide and wicked.  
  
“My lord,” he says and bows dramatically to the animal; Sereda knows in that instant that this serious young man with glittering eyes will be her best friend in the world. “House Saelac greets you.”  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
He’s trained by his father long before he’s actually trained - even considered - to serve the royal family of Orzammar. It’s a life-long course in pride with humility and his family knows it well, how it goes.  
  
Gorim learns about noble lines and Assembly antics, about procedures and traditions old and new - and a handful of very debated or suppressed ones that might resurface again depending on who’s on the throne. A lot, his father states several times, depends on who’s on that throne. Right now they’re lucky but everyone knows these things can change quickly.  
  
He nods, agrees, tries to remember it all. Tries, too, to ignore the memory of the king’s eldest - Trian, a perpetually grumpy sod, strutting around like an elder around his father and Gorim’s own father like Trian’s the one who’s actually crowned. And when he learns that Trian’s second has been sent away for unknown reasons, Gorim feels a chill of dread down his spine.  
  
For days he waits to hear the news; when they never come for him he relents again, momentarily.  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
The following year they attend a feast at the Provings together. It is meant for Trian’s birthday and Orzammar boils with preparations but all Sereda thinks about is how time is moving fast now. It’s moving _fast_ and she’s growing older and her world shrinks because of it. The cruelty of it wreaks havoc inside her chest, constricts her very bones.  
  
“I bet you a thousand roasted nugs that _I_ could defeat Lord Peyle. Dust to dunkels,” Sereda whispers to Gorim as the crowd cheers for the winner. He’s wearing formal wear and she can’t stop looking at him, has to keep from reaching out a hand to touch the fabric of his tunic. On the verge between childhood and responsibilities she often finds herself stumbling, wishing for sisters or friends, someone to talk to about these strange matters.  
  
Gorim’s hands that are broad and strong and covered in light hair and freckles and cuts, new cuts almost every time she sees him. Not that she makes a habit of remembering such details.  
  
Gorim’s face that is still somewhat childishly round like hers but there are edges to it now, the man he will become already trying to force his way out. He nods curtly at her remark.  
  
“I have no doubt, my lady.”  
  
Sereda rubs her forehead with the back of her hand. “Please don’t be so formal. I don’t like it.”  
  
_You don’t get to decide everything just because you’re an Aeducan_ , Trian echoes in her head. _Even lady princesses have to answer to their house and ancestors._ She wonders if Gorim thinks the same thing, if he finds her demanding and ridiculous like her brothers. He’s quiet for a moment as the proving ground is prepared for the next round. Lord Peyle is to fight a silent sister; everyone knows he will lose, even he seems to think so judging by the way he all but cowers down on the battlefield. Sereda stifles a sigh. An old fool in a fighting game, she hopes she will never end up like that.  
  
“It’s not my place to tell you this but - come your next birthday, I will take up the position as your second, my lady.”  
  
“Oh.” The words are like beats from a forge, one by one they fall into her; echoes against the cheers from the crowds and the heavy sounds of steel against steel. Her breath almost hitches in her throat, then forces itself out in painful little gasps.  
  
“It’s a great honour to have been pledged for this,” Gorim says; he sounds like he means it, too. “I only hope you will find me worthy, my lady.”  
  
Once - a young explorer through the secluded tunnels and back doors of the palace she grew up in -  she had thought she would find a pathway to another world. A dwarven kingdom from the books in their library, a sprawling city full of life, not barricades and darkspawn. Princess Aeducan would lead them there; all her games ended up with her leading everyone to a new future, vain and proud and bold. Forever _bold_. The servants had carried her back, day after day. Skinned knees, dirt-stained face, hair that had been stuck in stone knows what kind of mazes and had to be cut off in places. _She’s a sodding animal_ , Trian had hissed to their father who usually pretended not to hear.  
  
She has always known her childhood has been a wild parentheses in an otherwise linear life. A fantasy to keep her preoccupied while father focuses on his heir - some would argue that Sereda has been allowed to linger in this make-believe for too long already, that she has been given all the luxuries and none of the responsibilities of her caste.  
  
Now, in a cheering crowd, where the fires heat up the air until it closes in on her, she watches as the last remains of childhood burns away.  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
The year she is celebrating her fifteenth birthday conclusively marks the year when they forge her into Lady Aeducan. Once and for all.      
  
_Time is rusting_ , Trian mutters, rolling his eyes as though he’s been waiting forever to pick up the games of adulthood and power. Nobody ever speaks of it but there are days when she sees the glint of doubt in father’s gaze as it falls between them, his heir and the spares. Trian’s convinced of his own perfection, his face always serious and stern even as a child, as if he was born a burdened king of his caste destined for solemn duty to his people the second he emerged from their mother’s womb. They tease him about it, Bhelen and her. Mock him mercilessly for the contrived speeches and the bad impression he does of being a mirror image of their father.      
  
“Now it’s your turn to assume some responsibility, little sister,” he says as Gorim is presented to everyone at the palace as her second and she, in turn, is presented to Orzammar as the woman she wonders when she will begin to feel like she is. “Let us see how you fare.”  
  
Her father mentions in passing that it had taken him the better part of a year to put his own second to proper use, that she should not lose hope, that house Saelac is nothing if not loyal. She wonders if King Endrin has ever doubted _himself_ . She wonders how she can drive those weaknesses out of her own body.  
  
Stone and lava surrounds her on all sides as she steps forward, holding her breath.  
  
A woman grown. Almost. Lady Sereda Aeducan, from now on training to be the Commander of the King’s army.  
  
It’s a privilege and an honour; a part of her wants to turn on her heel, run away and weep like a child. Her breath held tight, a hot lump of discomfort in her throat, her shoulders tense.  
  
“My lady,” her second whispers, as if her thoughts are spelled out on the walls. “I hear there’s both plum jam and caviar at the feast.”  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
He spars with her the day that marks his very first on his new position while her brothers watch from the sidelines. He is eighteen, no longer a child, but their obvious disregard for his carefully trained moves put him off stride, nearly causes him to stumble like an overgrown boy.  
  
Lady Aeducan advances in strides - gets a hit on his chest, his leg, his upper arm as he spins around to block her - and her younger brother whistles. Gorim meets her skill without much effort, three years of practice ahead of her and a body that’s already broad and sturdy, immovable if he wills it to be. Even without the duelling training he had wished to partake in when he was younger he knows he is, by all standards, a solid warrior.  
  
So is the lady who is currently moving around him.  
  
“Put him in his place!”  
  
“Are you letting your lessers boss you around, sister?”  
  
She’s a good fighter but her instincts do not yet match her confidence. He takes advantage of a moment of doubt and hits her low on her back, high on her chest; the scratching sound of blade against armour linger in the air between them. It would be reasonable to use practice swords but the Aeducan training grounds are not there as a display for _reason_ so their dancing around have lethal edges and he’s got to work with that somehow.  
  
“Don’t hold back,” Lady Aeducan hisses when she catches that trail of thought in him, sees him glance up at her brothers. “They’re full of sod, don’t listen to them.”  
  
It’s a simple enough request for her, he thinks and steps to the side to dodge her blade. Gorim isn’t overly eager to be despised by Orzammar’s royal line on his first day but he doesn’t expect a princess to see that angle. Or any particular angle apart from her own.  
  
A deep breath and another dodge later, she pins him to the wall, the tip of her sword gently and very lightly placed against his chin.  
  
“My lady,” he says, his voice low. “Well fought.”  
  
Her eyes have a depth to them that he could slip into, a glittering sort of intelligence buried there, a certain kind of _force_ he gathers he will have to spend a great deal of time figuring out. Observe her with her servants, perhaps. See what type of noble she is. The worst kind, his father has told him, is the one who pulls ranks in their own private chambers. Shouts impossible orders to the cook or places unreasonable demands on everyone and everything simply because they are allowed to. _Fetch me a bronto from the Deep Roads before supper, I want to make a sodding good entrance tonight!_ Gorim suspects her brothers are both that type. He hopes his lady isn’t.  
  
“You held back.” She doesn’t take her eyes off him. Her brothers shout something in the background but he doesn’t hear what they say, only notices in the corner of his eye that they’re rising to their feet again. Hopefully to leave the grounds now that they’ve witnessed this.  
  
“You flatter me, my lady. If you truly think that-”  
  
“You held back,” she repeats. “I have seen you spar before. You’re an excellent warrior and several years my senior. Unlike my idiot brothers I’m not deluded enough to think I _won_ .”  
  
Gorim feels that he breathes easier once their broad backs are turned to them and he can see them disappear. Lady Aeducan looks that way, too, then back at him with a shrug.  
  
“In here, I want you to treat me like a warrior.”  
  
“My lady-”  
  
She holds up a hand to silence him and Gorim swallows a sigh, bites back a curse. There are things to be said about privileges and respect but he has no words for it, not yet. Things to be said about her capacity to toss around her titles and roles like others wrangle nugs - throw it out, pick it back up again when it suits her and expect others to follow along. But she is in charge and he can certainly follow orders.  
  
“Very well,” he says, lowering his head slightly. Even now he can see the irritable stance, her folded arms and that restless energy he’s observed in her before. If she’s anything like his own father’s stories about _her_ father, she possesses kindness but also a raging temper that lashes out against everyone who dares to remain within reach.  
  
“Neither darkspawn nor the sodding deshyrs will coddle me, will they?” she asks rhetorically.  
  
He pauses, but only briefly. Then he raises his gaze to meet hers. Firmly - _proudly_ , like his father always would because the ancestors have blessed them and they have earned the right to be proud  - and without fear.  
  
“No,” he says. “Not unless you bribe them.”  
  
There’s a chuckle at that, low and under her breath. The tempest has stilled itself, faded out into something much more pleasant.  
  
“If you have a way of bribing darkspawn, please let me know.”  
  
Gorim nods, allowing himself to grin back at her. “Noted.”  
  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
In the beginning it’s simple enough.  
  
Gorim slips into his role with grace and honour, never mentioning the fact that _she_ does not. He’s bred for service, trained for duty, every part of him adaptable and accepting. She’s spoiled enough to cause trouble wherever she goes and manages take others with her when she falls. He can’t allow himself to think too closely about that; his head spins when he calculates the risks and outcomes. For him life is a task, a problem to solve. For her transitions seldom come without great struggle - she’s confident and stubborn, set in her ways, poses ten questions for each order and that deep wrinkle in father’s forehead that Bhelen claims is entirely her doing. One for when mother died, another for their daughter and her lack of obedience.  
  
“Looking forward to the day you fall gloriously from one of your commissions,” Bhelen teases, hands on hips like he’s already a Paragon posing for a the sculptor that will immortalize him in heavy stone. Already too proud, she knows. Full of bragging tales with no substance. Ancestors help him.  Or keep him out of her way, if they can’t.  
  
“You will never be alive to see that, little brother.”  
  
The positions from childhood seem fixed; it worries her if she allows it. Not that the game of nobility has ever calmed anyone.  
  
“I will not let you fail, my lady.” Gorim’s voice is low, full of the sort of truth that she slowly but surely begins to think of as a fixture in the ancient stones, a rhythm that carries her onward.  
  
They form their habits, work out their truce.  
  
He is thorough and patient, she’s impatient and hot-headed; he lets her walk it off without letting her out of sight, she returns with a smile and an apology and for a month or so she is sure she has never apologised this much in her entire life.  
  
Sereda sneaks his favourite treats into his pockets when they train together, she finds the repetitive nature of her physical training exhausting so he helps them pass the time by telling her story after story about the lost thaigs, the Paragons, the kings of old and the history of the trade routes of Ferelden. It impresses her how much he knows, how thorough his education must have been; it seems to entertain him to learn how far her imagination goes, how vividly she can picture what she has never seen. The king's library is his, she tells him. He leaves books for her on her bedspread, notes tucked into the old tomes: _important lessons about our history; bloody human failures, read them and laugh; Tevinter! What a place._  
  
She has a sword made for his name day and when she gives it to him his eyes go wide and blank for a heartbeat. His hands look almost hesitant to touch the red steel but when he does, his expression is gently altered into awe and yet, she notices, it takes him a long time to actually use the gifted sword in battle. Perhaps he treasures it, perhaps it merely makes him uncomfortable. She never asks.   
  
He never asks but always notices when her monthly bleeding arrives and makes sure she gets the day off if possible and steers her gently through her unavoidable duties if not. They close around such matters with their bodies, treat them silently and without fuss. In the evenings she makes sure he has the best food the palace can summon, claiming her second in command cannot properly see to her safety and military education on an empty stomach; in the mornings he quickly learns what sort of hot beverage she wants to start her day with and ensures it is delivered no less than moments after she needs to leave her bed.   
  
He never again lets her win on purpose when they duel; she increasingly often wins anyway. It suits them both.  
  
They shape and reshape, form themselves loosely around the fixed truths beneath the ground.  


	2. Lava

  
When it changes, it’s in the details.   
  
The smallest of things at first, merely tiny cracks in the solid stone, gaps that do not threaten the foundation but make the walls only slightly less stable.   
  
He gets hurt on a brief mission hunting in the very outskirts of the Deep Roads, takes three genlocks with him and ends up with a rather shallow but still _nauseatingly_ painful bite from an axe in his left arm. Sereda is there when he returns home, her hands on his bare skin, the thin veil of worry shadowing her features.   
  
“Don’t,” he tells her when she gets to her feet, headed for the door of her chambers. He fears she will call for someone, bring forth more witnesses to his failures. It had been a mistake to allow her to see this in the first place, of course, he should have skulked back into the oblivious darkness of some tavern, asked a warrior for a poultice or just ordered an extra tankard to numb the pain. But the moment he had arrived to the Diamond Quarters to report he’d been told she wanted to see him.   
  
_And you, Gorim Saelac, ran straight over like a sodding pet nug._  
  
“It’s nothing. Barely a scratch-”  
  
Lady Aeducan waves impatiently in front of him, ordering silence without even saying a word. At least she hasn’t shouted for a servant. Or anyone at all. Instead she closes the door and returns to him with a crate full of supplies. He watches as her hands shuffle them around: vials, pieces of cloth, pastes and what looks like dried herbs.    
  
“My mother was passionate about these things,” she says when she catches his curiosity. “So I’m told at least. Suppose she would be in her position. My cousins and Trian would never stop climbing those rocks outside the Shaperate.”  
  
“Not to mention healing kits would come in handy after your average Assembly meeting.” He still feels uncomfortable for more reasons than just his injure but something relents in him when his lady smiles widely.   
  
“That, too.” She grabs hold of his arm without preamble and Gorim holds his breath.  “This will take the edge off the worst.”  
  
Gorim looks down on her fingers - strong, smooth, blunt - on his skin that looks paler in the well-lit bedchamber. There’s no way this is good, he thinks. No way that he should be staring at her like this, that she should be tending to him like a nursemaid, that he should notice how her tits strain against the casual tunic whenever she leans closer. There’s simply no _way_.   
  
_Princess Aeducan_ , he reminds himself. _Your lady and your better._ _  
_  
His duty is to protect her and there are days when he fails to see how that can be possible. How he can shield her from the dangers of her own upbringing, the pitfalls of Orzammar itself. Years and years of listening to his father talk about his long life of service has left Gorim both weary and self-assured and it blends into the way his lady throws reason aside for adventure, swaps tradition for rebellion like she has nothing to lose although the deshyrs are whispering about Trian’s scant support among the lords, about King Endrin’s favourite child and her growing military prowess.   
  
Then there are days when she smiles at him over the table, looks up from her studies or her training and smiles for no other reason than the fact that he walked into the room and those days, Gorim thinks with his breath catching in his throat, those days he knows he cannot even protect himself.   
  
There are days like this one.   
  
She looks up, almost as if she’s sensing his thoughts, and for half a heartbeat they look at each other in disbelief, in perfectly synchronized understanding.   
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
It’s in the details and she learns and un-learns them on a daily basis.   
  
A glimpse of a smile - softer, unguarded - when they are alone in the training grounds and she tells him a tall tale or compliments his swordsmanship. A glimpse of bare skin as they change out of their practicing armour and it stays with her for the remains of that day and deep into the night. The notion that other women are looking at him - that he looks back at them, that she thinks sometimes that she can see him study broad hips or let his gaze follow a fat tavern maid as she hurries forward on the street. _I’d bed him for that wit alone_ someone tells her once in passing and she wants to reply that she would, too.   
  
She is sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and Gorim is by her side.   
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
She’s nineteen and there’s a feast in the Palace; preparations have flooded the Diamond quarters for at least a fortnight and it appears it’s not yet enough.   
  
Gorim helps Trian’s second to set up the Proving grounds, double-check the guards on duty and their schedules, triple-check the guest list in case they spot any guest who will pose more a prominent danger to anyone’s health. The usual.   
  
“Son of a deepstalker, I want this damned feast to be over already,” Trian’s second - Verke, the fourth since Gorim was appointed Lady Aeducan’s and he hopes this one stays but knows he likely won’t, it’s not Trian’s way - huffs and drops a bunch of shields on the ground. They’re in disarray and will have to be rearranged before the feast and it will probably be Gorim’s task in the end. _A good mind for organisation_ , the king has point out a few times. _Clever and calm, the sort of thinking that serves us well in the palace_. Unfortunately these skills of his just as often mean he is left sorting out everybody else’s messes and utter failures.    
  
“It soon will be,” he says levelly.   
  
Verke rolls his eyes, tilting his head backwards. Dramatic, this one. Compared to the previous ones in Trian’s service he’s less likely to get the rest of them killed but he damn well is calm and composed like a dying bronto.   
  
“At least we will be served good food.”  
  
“Yes.”   
  
“And Lady Aeducan in a sodding _dress_.”  
  
“Yes- _what_?” Gorim nods, then freezes in his motion as Verke’s gaze seems fixed on something in the distance. And when he looks in the same direction he spots his lady entering the grounds not wearing her casual armour or even her formal suit but instead - Ancestors _help_ him - she’s wearing a red, silky outfit that seems to flow off her body in waves made of lava. His mouth dries.   
  
“Now if _Lord_ Aeducan looked like that-” Verke turns to him now, grinning widely behind his thick brown beard that Gorim suspects he oils every morning to have it look impeccable. “How do you manage to keep your hands off her all day?”  
  
Gorim does his best not to look directly at his lady who’s still far away, enough so that she won’t hear their conversation about her. Does his best, as always, to protect her from the way men speak of her when they think they’re being free to do so.   
  
“You forget your place,” he says in a low voice.   
  
Verke gives an exasperated sigh. “Don’t be such a joyless sod.”  
  
“Don’t get yourself into _trouble_.” Gorim speaks low, still, but his voice is sharper now. “The nobles have ears everywhere. Better yourself if you wish to live.”  
  
Verke looks at him for a long while but Gorim pretends not to notice. It has become second nature to him by now: ignoring the obvious conundrum in the palace, turning a blind eye to follies and vanities; now he pretends not to notice anything except the shields on the ground and the ground itself that needs to be properly managed before the feast. Perhaps he ought to remind the groundskeeper.   
  
And then his lady stands in front of him and he forgets just about everything from shields to feasts to how to breathe.   
  
“My father’s orders,” she mutters. “Had this made for me.”  
  
“So I see.” Gorim swallows, wonders how his throat can be so parched. “You look very festive, my lady.”  
  
_Festive_. He nearly snorts at his own choice of word and lady Aeducan raises an eyebrow, glaring at him. There’s vanity in her expression - her typical urge for acknowledgement, for praise - but also something he cannot remember having seen before in his life. A little crack in her composure. A softness that borders on doubt that is suddenly colouring her gaze, renders it _vulnerable_. It lands in the middle of his chest with a warm, heavy thud.   
  
Her shoulders slump a little as she takes a step to the side, as if trying to shake off the effects of her outfit.   
  
“I long for this to be over. I came here - I hoped you could-” she rubs the bridge of her nose; Gorim follows the line of her arm when she raises it, watches the soft skin and its scattered freckles and scars. Never before has he seen that she carries so many marks on her body. He wants his mouth over them, he thinks, wants to track them all with the tip of his tongue and has to block the rest of that thought to form in his head. “Sod it. Just walk with me. _Please_? People - everyone stares. It’s awful.”  
  
“My lady, if they stare,” he begins, uncertain that this is a very solid plan. His head throbs with restrictions and manners; his hands rest useless against his sides and he wills them to remain, afraid they’d reach out for her if he is too careless. “It is merely because you are the most beautiful sight they’ve seen in their lives.”  
  
She frowns - instinctively, it seems - and then her face goes completely still. And then, just when the apology is ready in his mouth - forgive me for speaking out of turn, my lady - she places her hand on his arm. He doesn’t move; she doesn’t let go.   
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
She’s nineteen and there’s a feast and she’s wearing a sodding _dress_.   
  
The look on her father’s face had been strange enough - _dear girl, your mother would be proud_ \- but the looks of everyone else, Sereda thinks, are even stranger. It renders her insecure which is a state of mind that she typically fights with every scrap of energy in her body except tonight is not a night of fighting. There’s a goblet of finest ale in her hand and a plate full of cheese with caviar and jam within very close proximity; all things considered she ought to be satisfied with how this night is turning out.   
  
She searches the great hall for faces, all of them familiar although she would not be able to connect them to an appropriate name. Her mother would have her head for it, judging by the way father and everyone else talks about her. A woman made for the Assembly. Level-headed, calm, analytical. Like Gorim, she thinks with that hitch in her chest that has appeared in there recently. A small catch as his name appears, a jolt through the system.   
  
Gorim who stands with the knights across the room but motions towards her when he notices that she’s standing alone.   
  
That she _is_ alone.   
  
“My lady,” he says; all it takes for him to suddenly stand by her side is a few strides. As though this is the only thing that separates them. A few steps across a room, the brief notion of solitude. In her family they have begun to speak of Gorim’s service to her, his dedication to the Aeducans. No commands needed, not a single complaint in all the years of service - even her brothers have to admit that her second is as loyal as they come. Smooth and subtle like a shadow in the palace, fierce and unyielding like the stones beneath them.    
  
“Gorim.”   
  
She smiles, raises her goblet and looks at him. He holds up his own, though she suspects it’s still mostly untouched. There are stories that he’s told her about knights who have been so blinded by drink that they’ve fallen to their own deaths during feasts, who have ignored the commands of their lords and ladies in favour of drunken brawls; stories of ignoble demises and unworthy displays of weakness. She knows that he would rather die than make a mess of himself in public. Has seen that hard edge in his face at times when he’s thrown drunken fools out of the palace. _I had a cousin who drank himself to death, my lady. Shamed his father. I’d rather die in battle._ _  
__  
_ “Are you enjoying the feast, my lady?”  
  
“Now I am,” she says without thinking.   
  
Something in his expression shifts, his eyes widen a little and he takes a sip of his ale. Sereda leans back against the wall, inching closer to the one source of comfort in this place and without looking at her, he does the same. They stand there together for a precious moment ripped out of the fabric of time, shoulder to shoulder with their backs safe and sound and their bellies full of food and drink. Had she not been surrounded by people - eyes, eyes _everywhere_ and the gossip that follows - she would have closed her eyes and rested in this feeling.   
  
“Would you like me to tell you about the guests, my lady?” Gorim asks eventually, his voice dropped to a soft note that _aches_ inside her when she thinks about what else he could say in this tone, what other worlds they could explore together.   
  
“Please do.”  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
It’s in the details and her father presents her with the first suitable noble he hopes will win her heart. Or at the very least defy her stubbornness.   
  
Sereda is twenty, impatient in everything but this, and walks out of the royal palace with a heavy pulse beating in her throat. It grows there, tangles into her breaths until they come out of her only with great effort. Orzammar closes around her today more than ever, a city as crowded as her own body lately.   
  
It’s not until she sits in the farthest corner of the Diamond Quarters that she manages to sort through her own thoughts again.   
  
The suitor had unkind eyes. Unkind eyes that had scrutinized her for a moment before nodding, as though he had been evaluating her, as though it had ever been his _right_ to evaluate the princess of house Aeducan. When she had pointed it out to her father he had looked sad, then _angry_ in that manner he reserves only for her. A quiet kind of anger verging on disappointment. The future of house Aeducan rests heavily between them all but at times it feels its weight is unbalanced and she doesn’t want to carry her brothers’ burdens. At this rate, she had told her father, Bhelen will populate the Diamond Quarters with his offspring and ensure future generations of spoiled little shits running about here, no matter what.   
  
That’s when she had been sent out of the palace  - _out of my sight, lass_ \- for the rest of the day.   
  
Gorim finds her without much effort, shortly after she leaves. She suspects he’s giving her some time to clear her head, that he’s been watching her from a distance, one hand on the hilt of his sword because it’s better to be better safe than sorry now that things are dire. All of their lives spent exactly like this: positioned within reach but never quite, carefully placed on opposite sides of walls they have not built themselves but must uphold all the same.   
  
He sits down beside her; she wants to have him in her arms.   
  
“I cannot marry that lord,” she says, so quietly she wonders if he’s heard her at all at first.   
  
When she glances sideways he catches her gaze; he has heard every word, she can see it in his eyes.   
  
“Why not, my lady?”  
  
“You know why, Gorim.”   
  
He looks tired, she notices suddenly. Strained, as if he’s holding back parts of herself the way she is. Of course he must be. Everyone does that here. There are times when she wonders if life would not be better down in the commons or even in Dust Town, but the one time she had mentioned it, Gorim had berated her, had spoken of luxury and privileges, of idealising the struggles of other people, making a mockery of one’s ancestors. It’s the only time he has used his harsh, unforgiving tone to her so the memory lingers.   
  
“Lady Aeducan,” he says now; his voice sounds less decisive than usual. Softer, warmer, _fainter_. “I beg of you, do not complicate your life more than necessary.”  
  
Is he a complication? Is he not merely the simplest matter under the stones, the one thing that seems logical in her heavily constricted world?   
  
“What about your life?” she asks even if she already know what he will answer.   
  
“I have no say in this, you know I don’t.”   
  
_More than I have_ , she wants to say but doesn’t. It might not even be true.   
  
She swallows, looks away. Below their ever-shrinking kingdom lies nothing but destruction and she feels, whenever she opens herself to it, a longing for something else. For a new vastness of surroundings, for possibilities, for a different kind of life. Ancestors will damn her for it but that is how it is.   
  
“We could run away,” she tries but they both know it’s a fool’s attempt. She’s a daughter of Orzammar and he’s an honourable man. They will stay here until they rot, remain on each side of the sturdy lines they’ve built around themselves. In a few years they will no longer escape the duty of marriage, of carrying on their respective blood lines and Sereda will be heavy with another man’s child, will perhaps need to pause her military advances while he carries on as before only with the slight change that he, too, might have married. Another woman will kiss the soft spot of skin below his thick beard; Gorim’s hands will hold her up, guard her and the babies yet to born.   
  
The swirl of pain turns in her stomach, twists itself slowly around everything.   
  
When he looks at her now, he looks as sad as she feels. They speak nothing more of it and when they return to the palace they walk straight to the training grounds and practices until there’s no room left for thoughts, only sweat and steel and blood.   
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
The tavern is full of ale and wenches - _whores for everyone_ , one of the elder warriors call out as they enter it. Gorim doubts it, the place is more than crowded.   
  
He regrets coming here. He sits surrounded by knights, finally out of armour after endless duty but he can still feel the weight of the suit on his body. At some point it will become part of him, the way it had become part of his father before him. He had died in that suit of armour.   
  
The first drink exhausts him. The second numbs his soreness, the third tickles his blood, the fourth makes him think about the Aeducan princess and Verke beside him points out a light-haired girl down by the tables at the end of the room. Not one of the prostitutes, he can gather as much from her manners and how she carries herself. A warrior in statue, perhaps a smith by trade. He could work with that on a night like this.   
  
“That’s what you need, I’ll say. Hilda is perfect for you, trust me.”   
  
Gorim sighs into his ale. Verke's not wrong. He’s wound tight around his own thoughts these days, threads inside the palace like a sodding maiden waiting for a glimpse of her knight and it makes him furious to think about it sometimes. That he’s degrading himself like that, _yearning_ for a woman who will never make reality of her bold moves or rebellious words, never stoop so low as to have a dalliance that could kill them both. It’s unfair to think of her that way, unfair in every sense of the word. Unfair to hold his own sodding weaknesses against her, to smear his sordid needs all over his lady. Unfair to blame her for his own failures.   
  
“Don’t look so grumpy, warrior,” the light-haired girl - Hilda - says and strokes his beard with one hand. Her tits are overflowing the dress she wears and her hips are as broad as his shoulders. She’s right, he decides. There’s no need for him to be grumpy in this company.   
  
“Well, perhaps you could help me out with that,” he offers. She grins back.   
  
She’s not the first; she will be the last.   
  
Orzammar is too small for its own damned good and a few days later, Lady Aeducan has heard the rumours that says Gorim Saelac has bedded Hilda Dural.  His face is hot, his insides chafe against his own skin at the mere thought of this gossip, the words being said about him on the streets. This is not how it goes, he is not a man the gossip-mongers  whisper about and he’s got no intention of ever becoming one. The moment he hears the first giggling gossip he swears off drinking entirely, swears of bedding ladies, too though he suspect that promise will be more difficult to live up to.   
  
“Yes, I suppose you are on the market,” his lady says, stiffly and through almost gritted teeth. They hurry along with several guards to get to the Proving grounds to watch her little brother compete in a vain feast arranged in his honour. “Interesting choice, however. Hilda Dural is so fat I can’t imagine she fits into her warrior outfit any more. But perhaps that is just your type. All tits and arse.”  
  
Her eyes look like the blacksmith’s fires, hot and untamed, and he feels how dry his mouth is. It seems he has nothing to say. What can he possibly say in response anyway? That yes, Hilda had been a sodding great girl to bed, all curves and laughter and a filthy mouth. If he says that, she will feed him to an ogre. And if he speaks of the truth behind it all - that he had bedded Hilda to stop his own body from betraying him, to force out the thoughts of what cannot be by being with someone who’s a lot of nice things but _not_ Lady Aeducan - he could just as well announce in the Provings later that he wishes to be assassinated.   
  
The soldiers that surround them pretend not to listen but of course they do; Gorim walks fast and with his gaze fastened somewhere beyond the horizon. As their company scatter - they _are_ entrusted to walk the bridge up to the Proving grounds without escort after all, he notices with the usual tinge of irritation - she turns to him, gaze searching.   
  
And he doesn’t know what do _say_.   
  
“Men will be men,” he manages eventually and she gestures so violently in protest to it that she accidentally shoves him into a Paragon - Astyth the Grey, unmatched in close combat and mother of the Silent Sisters - with such force that he thinks he’ll break a rib or two.   
  
She stoops over him, holds out a hand but even as he grabs it and allows her to help him up, he can see that the anger has not subsided as it mingles with worry.   
  
“Men will be missing their intimate parts unless they learn proper sodding _manners_ ,” she says - _hisses-_ before she walks away.   
  
  
  
*  
  
  
He apologises to her for the better part of three months. It proves difficult when she uses the castes for once, hides behind her title and name. _That will be all. See yourself out. Gorim, go fetch me a tankard of mead - take your time._  It grates a hole in him, somehow, a bitter, terrifying black hole that he doesn’t dare look into for fear of falling down. This is the truth of it all. The distance between them that is carved into the universe they live in. He’s a fool for dreaming it otherwise; she is a _cruel_ fool for pretending she cannot see the prize for her own frivolous flights of fancy. Should they put their feelings on display it would be the death of him and the fact that she does not seem to acknowledge this is a dark surge at the bottom of his thoughts.   
  
Even so he apologises.   
  
He apologises half-heartedly through deeds and dedication, more honest in those rare moments when she lets him speak to her in private.   
  
“I have forsworn no oath to you, my lady,” he tells her at last, his temper boiling beneath the surface. He keeps his hands busy with her armour, polishes it with a fervor while she’s watching him from the doorway. “With all due respect, if I have embarrassed you I am sorry but I have done nothing that is not within my rights.”  
  
She doesn’t answer at first. The armoury is uncannily quiet for a very long time and he looks up again to notice that his lady has closed the door behind her and stands before him. Like a slice cut out of time she stands there, shoulders slumped and her face wide-open as she looks at him.   
  
“I know this, Gorim. The apology should be mine to make.”  
  
“No, my lady-”  
  
A jolt through his body when she kneels down, so that she stands like him on the ground. Her hair rests long and wild over her shoulders, down her back, tangles with the ornaments on her casual tunic. Fire-hair, he thinks. Suits a woman who is more a beacon than anything else. With one hand she brushes away tendrils of flame, with the other she approaches his own hand that still pretends to be tending to the fastenings of her vambraces, the worn leather softer than silk under his calloused touch. How many times has he thought of undressing her when he’s sat like this, with pieces of her armour spread out? How many times has he moved his palms over the steel and wondered what his lady’s skin would feel like against him, how she would sound, what words she would mutter under her breath.   
  
All of this, he tries to remind himself, all of this is as far-fetched as it is unwise. Improper, _impossible_.   
  
“I _love_ you,” she whispers, like a blow to everything else around them. “I thought you knew.”  
  
Gorim puts her armour on the ground, finally, places the used cloth and the clean cloth right beside it as if he’s arranging himself in proper patterns. As if it helps. Lady Aeducan likes to see the world shaken up, he has always known that but it has scarcely been as blatant to him as it is now. She unnerves him, _undoes_ him; he loves her for it.   
  
Carefully, almost shyly, she moves her hand to his cheek and lets her thumb caress the rough outline of his beard. He leans into her touch. Their eyes meet as he, too, lifts a hand to her hair, to cradle the back of her neck and disappear into that maze of warmth that has always, for as long as she has known her, carried the scent of deep, dark earth. She’s the ground itself, like something rising from beneath them both. Her other hand comes up to his chest, sprawls out over his shirt that feels too small to contain all of this; he inches closer, she leans forward.   
  
“My lady,” he says and his words sounds like sighs. There is nothing else can _can_ say, not with her hands around his face like this, the breaths from her mouth landing on his beard, dampening it. “My heart.”   
  
Everything is subtly altered from that moment on.   
  
They remain the same; they break all the rules.   
  
  
  
*

  


  
He’s the first man she has ever kissed.   
  
She’s got him up against the wall outside an abandoned building in the commons, out of sight and out of reach for a few moments. It’s a good spot, secluded and overlooking the street leading down here. In theory they will see unwanted visitors before they are overwhelmed by someone. In _theory_ but Gorim’s hands are big and warm on her back, his mouth burns on her neck, her chin, the line of her jaw.   
  
_Paragon of Beauty_ , he calls her in private. It’s only half a joke though his voice drops to his most ridiculous notes when he says it; despite all that it makes all blood in her body pool at the pit of her stomach, travelling quickly down between her legs. _My heart._   
  
“My love,” she calls him and means it, a little more every time she hears the world out loud, as if saying it intensifies it. As if speaking of him renders him real and their prospects reasonable, not just a faint hope.   
  
Now he’s spinning her around until her back is flat against the stone surface behind and he doesn’t stop kissing her, not even for a moment. She wants him to continue, wants him to do other things, wants his breath on her naked skin and his body wedged into her own. Spreading her legs she offers him better reach; he groans into her mouth and wraps one hand around the back of her head, deepening his kiss.   
  
He’s the _first_ and when she tells him this he looks all but terrified for a brief moment. She wonders how it can be a surprise when he has followed her from childhood to this but perhaps it is. We see what we choose to see and then truth collide with us, bruising our dreams and ideals.   
  
He’s the first, the dream. Everything they have, they have to steal.     
  
  
  
*  
  
  
This is how time passes:  
  
  
She’s twenty-one and he gives her a ring forged hundreds of years ago by his ancestors. She places it between her breasts, hidden under bindings and out of reach; at times she thinks she can feel it in her own heart, as if she’s letting him inside beat by beat.   
  
  
\--  
  
  
She’s twenty-two and he’s getting new armour fitted as part of a reward for his faithful service to house Aeducan. She sneaks in as the blacksmith measures him, catches his gaze across the room and bites down hard on her lower lip as he makes faces to her through the entire fitting.   
  
They steal hours when they can, minutes when they cannot. They speak in ciphers and gestures, in half-whispered words and associations and it both exhausts and thrills her.   
  
“My father might see reason,” she argues, her hand resting on the fuzzy red hair on Gorim’s belly.   
  
“Even if he would, the rest of Orzammar wouldn’t.” He’s just as stubborn, only less imaginative. Sometimes it enrages her that he’s a solid wall of arguments and reality, like running into a stone made of pragmatism. Paragon of Pragmatism, she teases him and he sucks hard on her neck, leaving a trail that leads back to him.   
  
  
\--  
  
  
She’s twenty-three and knows that she cannot dodge marriage much longer but rushes headlong into her father’s military plans for her, arms wide-open at anything he suggests. The nobles are already talking behind her back - some say she might be wired differently, some claims she’s biding her time, others merely wants to know why lady Aeducan is holding out an would go to great lengths to discover something interesting - but the king still pretends he can’t hear it. _You can’t run from it forever,_ Trian says, his mouth a line of disapproval. _Watch me, brother!_ _  
_ _  
_ _  
_ _\--  
_ _  
  
_ She’s twenty-four and Gorim dodges a marriage proposal from a power-hungry smith who is eager to send his youngest daughter into a fine knight’s embrace. For a month Sereda prepares herself for the inevitable, in her solitude in the palace and out on the training grounds with Gorim’s sword clashing against her own.   
  
“I can’t let you do this,” she tells him as she hits the sword hilt out of his hand.   
  
“You have no say in the matter, my lady,” he replies and for a half a heartbeat she wonders if he’s even mourning the fact or if it’s a dark streak of freedom she can spot at the bottom of his gaze.   
  
She’s twenty-four and destroys the reputation of a woman she knows nothing about other than the fact that she cannot have what is Sereda’s. Destroys it in silence with all the venom she can muster, all the knowledge that only wealth and privileges can afford.   
  
Gorim looks sad when he tells her and she never dares to ask if he’s mourning the fate of the girl or the fact that they had to sacrifice her; she never dares to ask in case the pain in him originates from something worse still.   
  
She’s twenty-four and he’s nearing thirty and they live on borrowed time.   
  


*  
  
  
In the Assembly he bargains with their lives in a broken voice, pleads with his eyes fastened on the ground, with his gaze meeting the gazes of the gathered nobles, then later with no self-consciousness left to nurse, he begs on his knees.   
  
It’s the king he tries to reason with, the other blighted sods are never going to care for the arguments of a simple warrior, no matter how many years he’s served the royal family. He may be loyal but he’s not a fool and he knows he doesn’t count, in the end.   
  
What surprises - _angers_ \- him more is how little his lady counts, as well.   
  
“Let me go with her to the Deep Roads,” he asks. One last plea in this sodding place, one last thing and then he shall never ask Orzammar for anything ever again. “We shared the commission, after all. Let us share the punishment, my lords.”   
  
“No,” Bhelen retorts and the delight in his gaze makes Gorim curl his hands into fists where he stands.   
  
Later, in king Endrin’s room the tone is different but the message is the same.   
  
“She’s tough,” the king says with his eyes following the flickering patterns of light on the floor by his bed. Gorim thinks the smell in the room is one of illness - poison perhaps, he wouldn’t be surprised by anything at this point - and regret. The sting of pity is soon drowned in his hatred for the whole situation, however. “When she was a small child - she’d never let anyone rule over her, we used to say-”   
  
He trails off, a sob wrecking the voice entirely.   
  
“You will have to live with this now,” Gorim says because as all is lost he might just as well speak his mind. “The Assembly - and you, my lord. You know she didn’t do it.”   
  
“There was evidence-”   
  
“There was _nothing_ !”   
  
When he takes a few steps away from the bed, the king suddenly looks so small in these massive quarters. A whole family could fit into the bedchamber where he’s residing and Gorim is struck by the wastefulness of it all. So much coin poured into the decorations alone and if he even attempts to calculate the expenses in his head it makes him want to drive his fist through the urns and vases.     
  
They are so careful here with their rooms and their appearances. Always warm enough, every candle placed in its right place, each trophy and painting so artfully dusted. If only they were half as careful with people.  
  
“When you find her on the surface,” the king says eventually. “Please give her the shield and this letter.”   
  
He reaches for the bedside table with great effort and Gorim has to stop himself from helping the old man, to suppress all instincts and servile habits. Today he is not on duty.   
  
“When I find her,” he repeats and takes the letter he is given.   
  
“Ancestors forgive me.”   
  
Low and under his breath on the way out of the room Gorim answers. He wonders, years later, if the King ever heard what he said.   
  
“I hope that they won’t.”

  
  
  
  



	3. Sky

 

  
  
She’s twenty-five and no longer a person. Perhaps she ought to mourn this development but once the lack of basic necessities have tempered her the only thing she mourns is the loss of _him_ . Everything else is covered in dust and fury, painted with darkspawn blood and bile from her own vomiting down there where no one could hear her curse her brother, her father, her whole blighted bloodline.   
  
The sky cracks open the moment she steps out into the light and she bites back a sound, refuses to let it show; for the short walk down to the spot where the Wardens have set up camp she walks with all of her senses tied to one thing - that wide-open space overhead.   
  
“Unfortunate weather for your first day outside Orzammar,” the Warden-Commander says when they sit down by the fire. It still burns despite the rain; she knows it’s magic involved but doesn’t want to look at the source of it, doesn’t want to appear to have noticed. One of the other Wardens is a mage; if she cared for them in the least she might have wondered which one. Now it’s merely another strange occurrence in a long string of them and she guards herself against it, closes in on what’s left of the woman she was.   
  
“Wouldn’t know what to compare it to,” she says, willing her own voice to take on a shade of neutrality it has never possessed before.   
  
She thinks about Gorim; she cannot bring herself to _ask_ anyone about Gorim.  All these years of silence has carved him out of her language, eroded him minute by minute, day by day. Here on the surface nothing reminds her of him and she wonders how long it will be before he disappears from her.   
  
Before she falls asleep that first night as a surfacer she closes her eyes and tries to picture him safe and warm and near. Tries to imagine him walking this path, down the massive mountains and into a plane of forest, perhaps plains full of grass that she suspects is down there, somewhere. At some point.   
  
Topside landscaping is all fantastical stories to her but she would like to think he has grass where he is.   
  
  
  
*   
  
  
  
His mother no longer have a son and it’s a futile kind of rebellion - the kind his lady would never turn down - but he repeats her name in his head every step down the stairs from Orzammar’s entrance.   
  
Vilka of House Saelac, celebrated duellist and soldier in the fifth legion. Even if might serve her better to forget his existence as best she can, he has the luxury of remembering so he will.   
  
Down in that cell he had told his lady that he has no regrets. It’s not entirely true.   
  
He regrets that his mother has been granted such a hopeless son; he regrets having let his father down. He regrets - deeply and with such harsh, painful force that it shocks him - that he had not foreseen the fate of the woman he loves, that he’s failed her beyond what he had even been able to imagine. It should not have been this way, he thinks. It was his place to safeguard her from the dangers of Orzammar, including those rising from within her own bloodline. It was his _place_ .   
  
He repeats his mother’s name; he can’t bring himself to speak his lady’s.   
  
The sun is looking down at him from a pale, cloudy sky and Gorim grabs hold of a tree for a moment or two while he’s adjusting his eyes and his stomach to the ever-spinning world that spreads out around him on all sides.   
  
  
  
*   
  
  
  
On the eve of the battle at Ostagar she writes to him in the tent she shares with the other recruits.   
  
_Gorim Saelac, Denerim_ .   
  
It is forfeit even as she writes it, a doomed message if there ever was one but she writes anyway, about the Deep Roads and the deepstalkers, about Paragons and dungeons and her heart, how she will always keep it for him. If this wet, muddy chaos is freedom then deciding her own fate is what she intends to use her freedom for.   
  
She gears up for the oncoming battle, evaluates her chances of success and shields her heart in layer after layer of topside steel.   
  
  
  
  
*   
  
  
  
  
On the second floor of a filthy inn, Gorim wakes up from his potion-induced sleep with the taste of death at the back of his mouth. The walls are too-short and impossibly heavy around him. In the ceiling he can glimpse the night sky and the sight of it still makes him shiver.   
  
There are constellations in the sky, he recalls the names for them but not their shapes, can’t place them on the sprawling skies over his head and has already given up the feeble attempts. Sereda would have known them by heart. Not a single bloody deshyr but the names for stars in several languages.   
  
His lady used to wrap up the most amazing stories of the outside world; he remembers them now, one by one the come flooding his mind. Bored out of her sodding skull in her gilded halls she’d turn to make-believe and her mother’s old stories. He’d amuse her for a while, listen to her badly contorted plans of forming a band of mercenaries up there, escaping the bonds of blood and duty in Orzammar. He had never been tempted; it had always been an option at the back of his mind, a possible outcome of the lethal games down there.   
  
Now it has become his reality and there is no point in lamenting it. He figures he has still earned the right to do so, for a little while longer at least.   
  
“You’re awake.” A human sits by his bed. He hadn’t noticed before. She’s young and dark-haired, her gaze burning into his when he looks at her more closely. There’s a shudder through the air between them when she shifts, as though she’s rippling it. “Are you in a lot of pain?”   
  
For a while, half-defeated on the ground with the shrieking sound of animals and humans in the distance, he had been in nothing but pain. Soaring, tearing pain that had toppled him over and made him curl up like an infant. His arms had come around his body to protect itself, his face had been hidden under one of them and the noises he had made, low and drawn-out, a dying animal on the road. It must have been a pathetic sodding sight, a grown warrior hiding like that. An ambush, he remembers reluctantly. There had been an abush - nothing to do with him, everything to do with coin and supplies and he had fought to preserve what little he managed to get out of his previous life. The shield of Aeducan had been strapped to his back; he had beheaded the mercenary who had tried to tear it off.   
  
Gorim clears his throat. He feels rusty and badly suited for this place, this life. “None.”   
  
The woman nods. “My father’s potions are famous for that.”   
  
Is she a witch? He glances to the side of the bed and spots his sword and shield by the rickety nightstand. That’s a thing he’s discovered since becoming a topsider - how fragile things are up here, how exposed. In reality, he knows, the threats are merely different ones and appears from other angles than the ones he’s used to but even so the surface life seems so naked, stripped of its defenses.   
  
“You brought me here for a reason, mage?”   
  
“Mage?” She huffs in a manner that tells him he’s right.   
  
Does it matter? Mages can be killed just like anyone else if it comes to that. He blinks, looks at the window that’s too high for him to see anything through it. When he looks back at the human he notices that he’s still being observed by her gaze, blue and stern. This is going to be his life now, he reminds himself. Surface is full of humans and he can’t walk around being thicker than the stone made him or resort to becoming a sodding fool hiding in a village somewhere, still expecting to fall off the face of the earth. Shuffling his idiocy aside, Gorim clears his throat and starts anew.   
  
“You had your reason, I assume?”   
  
Outside he can hear the sound of people talking, horses snorting and the animals of the sodding forest come to life now that the sun is down. He wonders how long it will take to adjust to the cycle of light and dark.

“Yes.” Her facial expression hardens somewhat. “My reason was to save your life, dwarf.”

“Well then,” he says, nodding. “Thank you for that.”  
  
She walks out of the room shortly after that, returning to place a plate of bread and cheese by his bedside. A tankard of light, sweet ale. An apple. Gorim eats it breathlessly, his hunger returning to him all at once and then a little more with each bite.   
  
He remains in the filthy inn for longer than he cares to count. Discovers that the human witch owns the place, doesn’t ask her about restrictions of magic or apostates - a word he’s learned through careful studies but never found a reason to use - or anything in particular. They speak of the brewing war, of darkspawn and armies. She lends him books to read as he recovers and he devours them all, grateful for each distraction. His hostess seems to enjoy having company, there are days when he watches her prepare a meal or carry a tray of distractions to him in bed and catches her smiling, wistfully. On the wall he can see drawings of other humans that resembles her - dark and thin with sharp features and pale eyes - and he wonders where they are, if they have left her here alone. An undercurrent of that thought stays with him, softens his voice whenever he speaks to her.   
  
His injury is mostly healed by now, if by healed one might mean that the wound has closed and the pain subsided even without herbal remedies. When she took him in, he knows now, his leg had been badly broken in several places and he ought to be grateful he is walking at all, let alone walking without great pain.   
  
“Don’t suppose you’ll be a warrior again with that leg,” the mage tells him one evening when Gorim with great effort has managed to move to the bath and back again. If this is an old man’s life, this undignified struggle to maintain a minimum of independence, he hopes the darkspawn will kill him long before he approaches this stage.   
  
“No,” he agrees and refuses to look down at the useless lump of mending flesh and tissue, writing it off the same way Orzammar has written him out of the records. It stays, eating away at his thoughts and hopes for the future but he closes his mind to it.  “I suppose I won’t.”   
  
  


*  
  
  
  
  
Sereda re-learns, quickly and with great force. There’s no other option.   
  
The bickering dog lords and their strange politics, the surge and aftermath of the slaughter at Ostagar, the whole endless road that lies ahead now that the darkspawn taint is her destiny. Sereda picks up pieces where she finds them and forges them together to something that might even serve as a small army. A band of warriors, at the very least.   
  
They travel - at times it seems there is nothing to being a Grey Warden beyond this ceaseless journey, walking from one village to another, evading death and gathering forces for the Blight. She learns about magic and Antivan assassins, about the Chantry and Andraste and although her education has been thorough she has never expected to put her theoretical knowledge to any practical use.   
  
She fights her way through the Fade, through layer upon layer of the darkest magic possible. Comes up for air only to be pulled down again in a conflict of mages and their guardians. She thinks about Gorim then, wants him by her side to analyse and speculate, wants someone who can shake his head and mutter about sodding humans and their magic. There are days when she wonders if that is what she misses most of all - a kinship, a thread of light between her own body and someone else’s, a counterweight.   
  
High up on  a mountain they find a dragon and Sereda wants to marvel at it but the words get stuck in her throat as they corner it and methodically and with great difficulty manage to bring it down on its knees.   
  
  
  
  
  
*   
  


 

He re-learns, slowly. How to walk with a useless leg. How to speak to humans and elves, to lords and servants, how to look surfacers in the eye without disgust, shame or fear, how to move within his new caste in a country that pretends it has no such thing.   
  
As in Orzammar, visiting taverns is a sure path to opportunities of various kinds especially for someone like him who keeps his head sober and his mind open. Fereldan ale is vastly superior to most things he’s tasted but he restricts himself all the same. Talks to the locals, swaps tall tales and myths with fellow dwarves and on nights when he’s feeling adventurous he even engages himself in discussions about the ongoing war. Human lords and their armies, borders to be defended - he can talk about that, throw in a tactical remark or a half-arsed analysis of darkspawn advances.   
  
Topsiders have no idea what goes on in the Deep Roads, he learns that almost immediately and refrains from pointing it out every day since. It happens that he corrects some statements about darkspawn or Blights - that they are extinct, that darkspawn sleep soundly in some mythical place until a new Blight appears, that they are impossible to fight for ordinary soldiers - but most days he lets things pass.       
  
His biggest problem at first is the cold of the Frostback Mountains. He had been aware of cold weather on the surface but he had not been prepared for a climate so harsh that the words freeze inside his thoughts, hardens to ice in his mouth. For a long while he speaks as little as possible.   
  
Denerim, when he finally arrives, thaws him up again.   
  
The city is far from everything he had imagined it would in his near-feverish ideals and fantasies; so many days on the road with no company except the practical realities of here and now and he’s allowed himself flights of fancy. Still, they don’t compare. Even in its squalor and dirt - Orzammar is cleaner but it’s merely because the filth is kept out of the public eye - Denerim _shines_ to him.   
  
On his third week in the city he is offered a position with a smith he meets outside the Pearl. The offer is decent, comes with a room nearby and Gorim accepts it almost without pause. A room with a solid door and a comfortable bed, right in the middle of the merchants’ quarters where people come and go at all hours. What had initially irritated him beyond belief - loud sods yelling and clanking their swords outside his window - now feels like a safeguard against all sorts of dangers. Something happens in Denerim and Gorim will know quickly, immediately. Word travels fast in a city and now he’s a part of it.   
  
He takes his meals at a local tavern, buys his goods from the vendors down the street and he’s tentatively happy about it all. A pragmatic man surrounded by practical solutions.   
  
They had sentenced him to a life on the surface, like hundreds or thousands of dwarves before him and he had straightened his back and prepared to endure the punishment like the warrior he is; he had never counted on it carrying a scent of relief.   
  
  
  
  
*   
  
  
  
  
“You’re a good man, Gorim.”   
  
The blacksmith that has hired him - Orrin Varash - is a big man, stocky even for a dwarf and with a sharply cut face, arms the size of tree trunks. He keeps his beard close-cropped and his hair in a bun that rests against the nape of his tanned neck. _Never been inside that Orzammar, lad, can’t say I particularly want to._ A topsider through and through, almost impressively so.   
  
“Glad to hear it,” Gorim says, nodding at him over a bowl of broth with bread and fruit. They eat better food up here, he thinks, not for the first time since his exile. More colours, richer flavours, blends well with the ale the humans brew. “I’m grateful for the position. Not everyone would give an exiled man a chance.”   
  
“Don’t mention it. We may have turned our backs to the stone but we don’t need to turn our backs to each other, eh?”   
  
  
  
  
*   
  
  
  
  
He _thinks_ about her every day that passes by.   
  
A little more when he hears the rumours of surviving Wardens making their way from the ruins of Ostagar, a mythical travel across the country that seems far away for those of them residing within the city walls. These are dark times, darker than he had imagined back in Orzammar, but life has a tendency to go on.   
  
Those days he remembers her determination and independence - a double-edged sword back in the Diamond Quarters, leading her into trouble but also somehow typically out of it again. He wonders if she’s among the surviving members of the order he hears the Queen’s father has outlawed. There is no one to ask.   
  
Other days, full of bustling marketplaces and long nights getting everything ready afterwards, she is merely a ghost somewhere at the edges of his memory. A face he loves, the imprint of a smile or a kiss. Feather-light and out of reach.   
  
He thinks about her every day; he decides he will not speak of her.   
  
He must be a survivor up here, that is the debt he owes those who had to watch him leave.   
  
  
  
*   
  
  
  
Sereda spends the nights in camp sorting through her equipment, a newly founded habit that soothes her. By the fire she spreads out everything in her pack and counts it, polishes her armour, fixes a seam or a button, oils the leather of her vambraces and arranges the medical supplies though   
  
Never before in her life has she tended to her own belongings. When she tells the elf this once - mostly by mistake and in passing - he laughs. Not unkindly because he is not unkind, at least not apart from the attempted murder on the road. He merely seems to find her _extraordinarily_ peculiar and that, Sereda thinks, is entirely mutual.   
  
“Oh my dear Warden, you have lived a most excotic life!”   
  
“Probably,” she agrees and he chuckles again.   
  
Out of all the companions, the elf is the one who seems to like her the most and the feeling is mutual, though she truly could not say _why_ if anyone asked her. The element of surprise, perhaps. She had never expected anything from him and is fascinated with what she is being offered.   
  
When he offers himself she turns him down but not at all without pause and not as definite as she would have thought. A sodding elf, one that tried to kill her no less. He accepts the rejection as gracefully as he accepts everything else she tosses at him and for that, Sereda thinks, she nearly loves him.     
  
“So, let’s hear it - when will you tell me more of your exciting tales from Orzammar?” he asks and slips down beside her by the fire, handing over an unopened bottle of brandy. “I happen to know that you are royalty, no?”   
  
She yanks the bottle open and downs a mouthful before nodding, bracing herself.   
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
He crashes into his new family like something falling from the skies.   
  
A couple of days at the smith’s workplace and Gorim has spilled the story of his exile, told them about his father’s wounded pride, his mother’s quiet tears when he left, about duties failed and plots that he should have seen through, games he ought to have known how to play. The words rush out of him, all boundaries breaking at once; for _months_ he has kept to himself, spoken with a scant few people and the tight spaces below ground has made him ill-suited for solitude. He scrambles for new foothold in this new city and his employer seems to sense the lengths Gorim would go to, spot the streak of urgency in him. Not that it’s subtle, he thinks but refuses to feel ashamed.   
  
“We’re having roast pig,” Orrin tells him as they finish their work by the end of Gorim’s first week in Denerim. “My wife Brita makes the best roast pig in Ferelden - tastes better than nug, let me assure you!”   
  
Gorim nods, offers a polite smile.   
  
“You ought to come with me today,” Orrin continues, placing a hand on Gorim’s back. The gesture makes him think of his lady, of all things. It has been so long since he was close to other people, felt friendship of any kind, had anyone touch him in this manner - casually and mostly in passing, without any particular reason. “She always makes enough food to feed all smiths in Thedas.”   
  
“I’m not a smith yet.”   
  
“Ah, that’s nitpicking.” A wide grin, baring uneven teeth and an open heart. “Trust me, lad, you won’t regret coming.”   
  
He doesn’t. Not once.   


  
  
*  
  
  
  
  
He rushes headlong into his new family and within weeks he is part of it, swallowed by its warmth and generosity.   
  
Now every day Dara sits right in front of him, her grin widening as he tells her about his day - anecdotes from the market, details about who’s asked for what and who has tried to haggle his way out of paying at all. She cuts in that the human nobles are the worst - pompous sods, cares only about appearance even now when the war is breathing down their necks. The darkspawn might kill their father but they still absolutely and utterly _need_ that silk from Rivain. Dara rolls her eyes, mimics the way a human lady will carry herself - tall and proud, those tiny hips swaggering as though she really wants to be a dwarf. He laughs, offers a similar story about the nobility of Orzammar and feels like a traitor when he reveals that the dwarven nobles are conceited asses, too.   
  
She likes that, it intrigues her so he decides that being a traitor might be worth it if she laughs.   
  
They talk a great deal. She has a  way of making him feel at ease, a natural talent for speaking to everybody. A warm, even-tempered personality that slowly grows on him; she’s modest and honest in her outlook on life, a far nobler person than Gorim can hope to be, regardless of origin. The struggle of Orzammar, he fear some days, has rubbed off on him, made him as greedy as the humans think all dwarves are. Hungry for coin and glory and willing to go to any length to achieve it.   
  
He never used to think like that down in Orzammar, never used to question tradition. It had served very little purpose apart from making him uncomfortably annoyed, nursing that growing little _itch_ in his body. With the sky and the sun hammering down from above he transforms, and his thoughts with him. Everything seems so far away already, buried in ancient stones and archaic rituals, the bickering of the castes as fixed and predestined as the destiny that awaits them all below ground, the dark threat closing in on them for every day. Gorim has given his life to the finest house in Orzammar, has built himself around its safety and prosperity and when it repays him by throwing him out he finds that he has to forcibly remove himself from the bitterness and anger.   
  
He never would have thought he was such a _needy_ son of a nug.  That he dreams, even now, of returning in full glory, all his honour restored and with his knighthood as a blighted trophy again, as before.   
  
“You did nothing wrong,” Dara assures him. “Perhaps one day they will see it too, thick-headed lords as they might be.”   
  
It calms him to learn that Dara and her father are different altogether, built of better stones.   
  
“I don’t want to go back there, though,” he says even if he isn’t certain that is the truth. Wouldn’t he want to go back if he could? Wouldn’t that be precisely the sort of thing he secretly wishes for? He pours himself more ale and grabs a fork to dig into Brita’s lovely meal.   
  
“I’m glad, Gorim. We need you up here on the surface.” Their eyes meet across the table and his heart warms a bit at her slow, soft smile.  
  
They talk every day. Eventually he tells her about his lady Aeducan, about the Diamond Quarters and his position, about the brothers and everything that came after. Dara sits quiet for a brief moment once he’s done; Gorim has time to regret his honesty several times over but he couldn’t do it any other way. Not with her.

“She has your heart?” she asks at last.   
  
“Aye.” He lowers his gaze into the swill they’re serving today, something Antivan if he caught the innkeeper's words correctly. “You could say that.”   
  
Dara seems to consider something, eyeing him thoroughly while spinning her drink around between her hands. It’s a habit of hers, he’s learned by now. Hands in constant movement when she’s thinking, a little tilt to her head, causing the brown hair to fall over her left shoulder. Sod it she’s _beautiful_ . There’s a hitch to that thought at first, a scratch of pain in him as it passes. Loyalty, he thinks. He’s spent half his life forging his own being into a loyal servant of the Aeducan princess, body and soul; you can’t beat that out of a person just because they’re stranded on the surface. A servile mindset: ever-focused on slights and dangers, keenly aware of every misstep of others, each situation presenting itself as a potential danger. It’s a practice as natural to him as breathing. _You’re no one’s second now but your own_ , Orrin had told him once, his big hand on Gorim’s shoulder. The weight of it, the _lightness_.

Sereda isn’t here. Orzammar isn’t, either. He’s lost both of those things if he ever had them but this, right here in this little room, this is something he has earned. It makes him heady with triumph.   
  
“You have a big heart, Gorim Saelac,” Dara concludes eventually. She smiles - softly, only the corners of her  mouth at first, then wider when he returns the smile. “I think there might be room for me in there, too. Is there?”

A rush of relief run through him, pools in his stomach. He hadn’t been aware that he felt so strongly about this matter. Or felt so strongly at all, anymore. Seems nearly impossible that he should want to wrap his arms around her and hold her, kiss her plump little mouth and let her do whatever she wants to him.   
  
“There is,” he says. “ _Definitely_ is.”   
  
His own relief is mirrored in her eyes. “Well, good. That’s settled then.”   
  
Gorim has to  let out a laugh at that, a strangely wild and free sound that surprises him though perhaps it shouldn’t.

  


 


	4. Blight

  
  
  
  
  
Rumour has it that Gorim is a smith now.    
  
She’s staying in Denerim for a fortnight to resupply and regroup and finds that she’s absorbing the gossip like water, lets herself soak in it. There’s no end to the stories people will tell her. The elf problems that seem to run rampant in that Alienage, the talk of some dead lord and the ever-present shadow the regent himself casts over his city.  _ Use all of your stealth walking around here _ , Leliana had instructed her upon arrival and Sereda had nearly laughed at the idea of a loud-mouthed dwarven princess possessing any sort of spy or bard talents.    
  
And the rumours, they drown her like rain. Outside the chantry someone speaks of Orzammar; in a dirty back-alley she loots a sword that looks uncannily like the ones used at the Provings; when she visits the local smith she overhears him complain about the dwarven merchants setting up permanent shop in Denerim.    
  
“They’re stealing our customers with that dwarven craft.”   
  
“Never fear, Herren, I’m still the best blacksmith in Denerim.”   
  
Sereda breathes into her fists in a secluded corner of the shop. Breathes and counts her breaths - one, two, three, four, five - before she gives him coin for her new drakeskin gloves and turns on her heel to walk away.    
  
The second day inside the city gates she sees him - or someone who resembles him; she doesn’t dare to walk up to the marketplace to confirm it, doesn’t follow when Wynne and Zevran go there to look at the wares or when Alistair wants to look inside the tavern to see if they still serve the kind of ale he once got here with his uncle.    
  
Around them the day bustles heavy and hot under the sun and Sereda sits in the room she rents under a false name in the uglier parts of town, one seedy back-alley away from the Pearl.    
  
She’s  _ stalling  _ the same way she’s stalling their journey to Orzammar despite knowing full well that whatever goes on in there right now will need to be handled, one way or the other, in order to gain the support of the dwarven army for their war. They are already fighting below ground, she had protested the first time Arl Eamon had suggested it, causing several stares and a few raised eyebrows. She’s stalling because each step closer to her past makes her throat swell while Denerim in all its broken misery allows her room to breathe.    
  
The following day, her third in the city, the approaches the eye of the storm in small steps and in waves. Lengthening her stride only to come to a halt, then she picks up her map of the city and pretends to study it before continuing forward.    
  
Inside her there’s a rift: on one side the kind of aggressive curiosity that would have had her killed in a heartbeat growing up, had she not been surrounded by protection in the shape of coin and warriors, on the other side there’s that deep-rooted fear, a blank spot that’s just waiting to be filled with whatever horrors her mind can conjure up.    
  
To learn that the merchant isn’t Gorim.    
  
To learn that he hasn’t survived.    
  
To find out once more that she is all alone.    
  
  
  
*   
  
  
  
The first time he sees her on the surface - that feverish fantasy he’s nourished ever since the exile, the almost blinding desire at the back of his mind - he feels like it’s something that happens to someone else. Much like the mockery of a trial he attended, with the main character locked up voiceless and without rights as though her word had no value. Gorim had stood there and thought for several moments  _ what an odd thing, what a horrible show they put on _ before recalling its meaning and purpose, the reason he had been there in the first place.    
  
Now he’s in Denerim and he’s a sodding merchant and she stands in front of him, a little worse for wear outside of her beautiful palace or perhaps she’s never been better. He no longer knows the minor details of her existence, all those dents and fractures of her composure. All he knows is that his lady Aeducan is there. No longer his lady nor a lady at all, he supposes; his head is blank, there’s a jolt of grief in his chest, a flare of devastation.    
  
_ I will always love you, my lady _ .    
  
Her eyes are darker somehow; he wonders if the constant company of darkspawn alters you, if it hardens you from the inside the way lyrium does, the way drinking does if you let it.    
  
“I knew you survived. I never stopped believing it,” he says, voice rusty and full of gaps where the past threatens to fall through.    
  
“My lady,” he says, stubborn and out of place.    
  
“My lady, please, don’t ask me to come with you,” he says. The words are harsh in his mouth no matter how much he softens his voice, whatever lows he drops it to.    
  
He thinks about Dara and her soft rounded belly that seems to grow a little more each day now, the way she arranges flowers on the table before they take their meals, the way her father kisses her on top of her head, the way  _ she  _ kisses Gorim - full-mouthed, wholehearted kisses - when he beds her. The place they’ve got here, the little garden spot Dara plans on creating  _ once this Blight is over _ because she plans ahead, refuses to believe they will perish.  _ History tells me that have yet to defeat us, my love. _ And now with the child on its way Gorim, too, is prone to adopting her manner of having faith in what will come.    
  
Sereda’s eyes are wide and green, looks the exact way he remembers them and yet nothing like it at all.    
  
Later, only an hour or so but it feels like a lifetime has passed and Dara places her hand on his shoulder when he sits down by the table in their home. It  _ is  _ a home, he reminds himself. His home. All of this is real and hard-earned and deserved. He has broken no promises, betrayed no code of honour to achieve it. Ancestors had smiled at him the day he married into this family and he had written a letter to his mother, telling her the news. She had sent her reply in the shape of a brief letter and the hilt of a practice blade he got for his third or fourth birthday. The reply, when it arrived, had made him miss Orzammar so much it left him breathless, choking on the memories that no judgement from the Assembly can drive out of him. He’s not a sentimental man but becoming a topsider has altered all of his emotions, bared them the same way he is now bared to the sun. He had never expected that.    
  
“What’s wrong?” his wife asks him but he can’t tell her. Not this time.    
  
  
  
*   
  
  
  
Her fourth day in the city and they assist the locals with some practical matters while stocking up on both food and medical supplies. Sereda wants to sleep more than anything in the world. The weight of the world on her shoulders has not yet settled there, not quite, and it leaves her exhausted. In the evenings she stays up late to plot the quickest course through the rugged terrain - thinks she has found one when Alistair walks up from behind her to point out that the passage is overgrown or overrun with bandits and dragonlings so they will have to start over again. When she finally reaches her bed her body is tired but her mind soars. Every morning she’s awoken by nightmares -  _ visions  _ \- of their deaths.    
  
And Gorim just stands there.  _ There  _ but more out of reach now than he has ever been and it does something unspeakable to her, this quiet defeat.   
  
Denerim is crowded and warm and Sereda busies herself until sunset, not allowing her feet to march in any other direction that she firmly tells them to. Then she does, anyway.    
  
He waits for her by the marketplace, a pack of leftover goods over his shoulder and a purse of coin that he tucks into a pocket. Regardless of how she looks at him, whatever angle she uses, everything about him appears to have been subtly altered. It’s not the way he’s out of his armour, stands in this new land surrounded by novelties, not even the way he’s braided his hair in a new fashion - she notices; she has often made those braids after all, let her fingers run through his thick strands in order to command them, tame them. It’s not that. It’s how he looks at her, how his gaze falls on her side, his words aim for a spot just below or right above but never quite straight  _ at  _ her.    
  
The fragments of him in her memory, all the details she knows about him, the vivid images and the scattered impulses - none of them would lead her here. Yet here he is.    
  
When she stands close enough he nods, a brief smile on his lips. She nods, too. There’s a dull pain somewhere at the back of her head and she lets her eyes rest on his face, lets it remain there to center herself. Sink into the moment.    
  
“Busy day?”    
  
He nods again. “Always is. Good thing about a Blight.”   
  
There are so many things about him and they fall into her again:    
  
A scar on his right shoulder blade and how the path up there tastes under her tongue; his preference for sweet things and strong ale, preferably together; how he sounds when he laughs quietly at something outrageous she says in front of a crowd; how the trail of red curls lead from the thick fur on his chest to the the slight curve of his stomach, there where he’s soft and warm and gentle somehow; the books he reads to relax and the books he reads to brush up on his knowledge of history, politics, the world - so many titles that she could arrange a whole library with them; the soft, endlessly mild voice he would use to tell her he loved her.  _ My heart. My love. My lady.  _ __   
  
She wonders if he speaks the words in the same way to his wife; she wonder if she could endure it if she knew the answer to that.    
  
“Do you want to - can we sit down? Get a table at the Gnawed Noble?”    
  
There’s a small commotion behind them as a guard pushes two commoners out of said tavern; someone else shouts something and Sereda almost immediately reaches for the dagger she carries around even when she’s walking the streets as a civilian. It passes. That’s one of the things she enjoys about the city - that more often than not things  _ pass  _ here, without involving her or bloodshed in any way.    
  
Gorim’s face when he looks at her again, she has to bite back everything she wants to say and force her own body to merely stand there, motionless and silent.    
  
“Gorim-”   
  
The equipment in his backpack make a rattling noise when he hoists it further up his shoulder. It makes his tunic strain over his chest and Sereda looks away. It’s no longer her image, no longer a sight that she can treasure in the privacy of her bedchamber.    
  
“I’m glad you are here,” he says very quietly. “But I have a new life now.”   
  
  
  
*   
  
  
  
  
Her fifth day in Denerim - he counts them; each dawn and sunset he  _ counts  _ the way Dara counts the months until spring - she’s injured and has the old healer with her wherever she goes.    
  
They visit Herren’s shop, they buy herbal remedies from the soft-spoken Antivan, they take their meals - bread and cheese and fruit fresh from the marketplace - in a calm spot near the Chantry. Gorim watches it, all day, from where he stands. The weeks when he’s out here are the ones that bore him, he much prefers being in the smithery, learning the craft of his people; master the massive metal and temper the softened steel, these are the sort of things that that one could be proud of. For a warrior who can no longer fight there is at least comfort in the knowledge that he helps others carry out the duty.    
  
His lady doesn’t understand. He knows this without even having spoken of the matter with her, knows it as intimately as he knows everything else about princess Aeducan. Facts wrapped tight around his thoughts, running in hard-knit patterns inside his chest.    
  
His lady doesn’t understand; his bones ache for her like she’s a missing part all the same.    
  
“Battle injury?” he asks when she stops by his stand later. She has no business there and even so he knows she will come by in the same fashion he would always find a reason to visit her at the palace during days when there were no specific needs for him, no duties to carry out.    
  
She looks down at her left arm that is wrapped in a light cloth.    
  
“We got ambushed in some remote back alley.” The corners of her mouth twist a little, a brief smile appears. “I almost feel like I’m back in Orzammar.”   
  
Gorim gives a chuckle at that and it stills something between them, opens the air somehow. He remembers her in Orzammar and Orzammar in them, his head swarming with details resurfacing and details that have never left in the first place.     
  
“I trust you made the ambushers regret their decision, my lady.”   
  
“I’m not a lady, Gorim.” A tiredness in her voice now, a weight that drags it down, lowers it ever further. “Wardens have no titles. You know this.”   
  
He knows this. The Order of the select few come and go into the Deep Roads like very few others, he’s met his fair share of Grey Wardens. They might be knights or ambassadors, cutthroats or thieves -  or proper sodding royalty of the first house of Orzammar. Part of him cannot help but consider it a bloody waste of a fine noble bloodline, another part of him will be endlessly grateful they had managed to save her from becoming a corpse for scouts to stumble over in a decade or two. The stakes had been high but lord Harrowmont had managed to trade her death for a lifelong service to the Wardens. He wants to ask if she can live with that trade or if the price was to high but he isn’t certain he can endure the answer.    
  
“You shall always be my lady Aeducan,” he says instead.    
  
Her fingers run over the injured arm again, patting it lightly. In a different life she used to tend to his injuries like a battle medic, would drop to her knees in front of him, eyes fixed on his wound and strangely glittering, visibly enjoying the change of power. That had always been one of her favourite things back then - shifting hierarchies around, re-balancing the positions. It’s a folly of the noble caste to play commoners but he’s seen enough damning follies not to care much about the harmless ones.    
  
Lady Aeducan may be as arrogant as can be expected of a princess but she is, Gorim knows with a certainty that still wrecks him, a good woman with a big heart. The best and bravest of them all. The honour of having had her love - he has come to realise that he cannot speak very much of it because his words are not enough.    
  
Her hand reaches out for his and he grabs it without thinking.    
  
The regret feels like fire, scorching his skin.    
  
  
  
  
*   
  
  
  
  
“What is she like, this lady Warden of yours?” Dara asks. There’s apprehension at the bottom of her voice now, a hard curve to the way her voice moves over the words.  _ She is not mine _ , he wants to say.  _ She was never mine; I was hers.   _ Perhaps it doesn’t make a difference.  __   
  
“I would love to introduce you.” The words slip out of him without purpose. It’s not even true, he would not love that scenario and he fears now with a jolt of pain that he’s pushed it too far, that Dara will distance herself from him. He is suddenly made aware how intensely it would hurt him to lose her.    
  
“Perhaps one day.” His wife turns her back to him and he gets up, approaches her where she stands. With his gaze he follows the outlines of her shoulders and arms, the small curves and the larger ones, each hollow and height. He lets one of his hands brush over the back of her neck, gently removing some escaped curls and she spins around when his light touch tickles her.    
  
“My love,” he says, softly and mostly to the delightful freckles on her forehead that tastes faintly of salt and that sweet-scented oil she uses to tame her thick hair. Gorim plants a kiss on her cheek, then her mouth.    
  
When he lets go of her Dara exhales, as though she has been holding her breath.    
  
  
  
  
*   
  
  
  
Sixth day in Denerim and she stays away from the marketplace, remains within a safe distance, fills all the empty moments of her hours with words, tasks, people.    
  
Seventh day and she goes with Alistair to find his estranged sister from another life. It ends terribly and she feels a strange and almost exhausting kind of kinship with the human prince in disguise. That night they drink of Wynne’s stash of wine until the stars above them blur and Alistair rambles about a rose that he gives her and Sereda manages to misplace almost immediately.    
  
Eight day in the city and she sleeps, pulls the blanket over her head in the drafty room and breathes into the nooks of her own body.    
  
  
  


*   
  
  
  


When he has not seen her in four days, Gorim begins to think she has left the city unannounced. It pains him but at the same time he thinks it might be for the best, for both of them. To close the open wound, or at the very least cover it up. That’s how he thinks on his way home, repeating the truth in his head the same way he had repeated his mother’s name while walking into his exile.  _ For the best, for the best, for the best.  _ __   
  
Dara reaches for him the second he steps inside their home, placing one of his hands on her belly and breaking his tight chain of thought. For a heartbeat he is dazed, disoriented. Thankfully she doesn't seem to notice.    
  
“Do you feel it?” Her mouth is open, her gaze as warm as the fireplace behind her. Under his fingers something stirs. “He’s been spinning around all day.  __ There  \- you can feel that?”   
  
Gorim nods, wordlessly overwhelmed.   
  
  
  
  
*   
  
  
  


In the outskirts of Denerim’s city center, right by the wall separating it from the world, he finds her as she is about the leave. Everything is packed - supplies and weapons, poultices and spare armour - and there is no longer a reason to linger. 

Gorim leans against the stones, arms folded across his chest. When she draws nearer he stands up, walks a few steps towards her and - on cue - her travelling companions all scatter discreetly into the shadows. Sereda wonders how much they understand. She doesn’t wish to ask.    
  
“I’m not fond of farewells,” she says, almost shy in his presence now. He is someone else and her life has transformed her into a leader of Wardens. The trace of their pasts in their bodies is fainter and fainter, soon it will no longer be discernible at all. Only if they keep seeing each other, she thinks. Only then will he be this weight inside her, this  _ presence _ .   
  
His thumbs press down over the back of her now; she can feel him in her bones. “Be careful. Orzammar doesn’t forget easily.”   
  
_ Neither do I. My love.  _   
  
“I’m not afraid,” she says although her chest constricts at the memory of the stone that shaped her once. Not for the first time since the exile she has wondered if they mistreat ascendants so deeply because all the nobles down there know that once you leave the lava and the darkspawn behind, your feet will not want to march back. Stone sense be damned.    


“I am,” Gorim says.    
  
“Well, perhaps that’s sensible.”    
  
“One of us has to be, my lady.” His voice is warm, a hot breath against her skin. There’s something else leading back to Orzammar, to. A path of sensations, of sights, of words, a whole map’s worth of something they had never been able to express. “Keep one eye open to conspiracies.”    
  
“It’s different this time.” She hopes she’s right. That her new title will shield her, place her above the petty bickering of the Assembly and its endless chains of honour and betrayal.    
  
When she looks down she notices that they are still holding each other’s hands, like children in their chaste affection for one another. So very unlike the thoughts that are rushing through her head, the impulses his touch sends to her nerves and blood, the way it beats in her chest.    
  
“Be safe, Gorim.” She tries to smile; it feels painful. “Don’t fall off the earth while I’m gone.”   
  
He lowers his head, lowers his voice. And finally he lets go of her hands.    
  
“Ancestors guide your path, my lady.” 


	5. Ashes

 

  
  
When she returns next the entire city is in deep turmoil and the lords gather for a Landsmeet that is apparently as remarkable as the Warden at the heart of it.    
  
The outcome, people say, is remarkable as well. The Hero of River Dane defeated in single combat and pardoned - _ no, no conscripted he is, to serve the order he sought to erase; serves the bastard right if you ask me  _ \- and now the true Blight is upon them as well. Dara had heard rumours of an archdemon, had trembled in his arms last night as they were shutting their doors and windows with more care than usual.    
  
A true Blight and right in its ugly heart the dwarven commander walks with her head held high.    
  
Denerim  _ boils  _ and Gorim can’t avert his thoughts or his gaze this time, he thinks about her armour in the dead of the night, thinks about maintenance and preparations for battle, about the hilt of her sword and the dents in her family shield. There had been none last he saw it but he imagines her journeys since then, pictures her battles and her lack of care afterwards. Sloppy and tired, eager to move on to the next task at hand he knows she will likely not pay much attention to her equipment simply because she has never needed to before. That used to be his job, one of many little things he did for her without ever speaking of it, a seamless detail in their grand scheme of minor matters that had to be tended to. In retrospect he is not even certain she had ever noticed them.    
  


He comes to the Arl’s estate in Denerim with the shield of Aeducan that he has had in his possession for longer than he cares to remember. The old king’s eyes then, hollow and black as the nights below ground.  _ This is hers, Gorim. This can never be anyone’s but Sereda’s _ . He has held on to it since then, held on to it far beyond what he intended to as though it has served as a last desperate attachment. A link between the two of them even now when he is meant to be his own man and she is meant to command the armies that will drive back the Blight.    
  
It feels small - cramped,  _ petty  _ \- when he hands over the shield of Aeducan at long last.    
  
His lady barely looks at it; doesn’t ask why he’s not given it to her earlier. There’s a whole blighted world of words and gestures he could offer her had things been different but they are not. That knowledge is a dark core in his chest; he wonders if she feels the same way, if she feels something at all as she looks at him now.    
  
“Bhelen’s dead,” she says then, her tone is hollow and brittle. A worn-out blade. And even so, despite the ashes they walk upon or because of them, all the dirty ruins of her past, she’s  _ magnificent _ .    
  
Gorim turns around to look at her where she stands under a massive painting depicting some human lords who lived a long time ago. In a world where they’ve been ripped from their own ancestors he figures they might just as well try to please others. Or quell Blights. That surge of pride in his chest again when he thinks about what she’s accomplished since he sent her off to her death in the Deep Roads. That last moment together, her hands reaching for his neck, his mouth buried against her dirty skin. She had tasted of ashes and blood and he had sworn to himself to never forget her face.    
  
“My - I’m sorry.”   
  
“It was my blade that killed him. During Harrowmont’s coronation, no less. I was-” she cuts herself off, runs a hand through her hair in a gesture that is unfamiliar. Like him she has composed herself in this new place, put herself together from the wreckage of their lives. A lot of it, he suspects, remains the same but some parts must be new. Her hair, for example. A pride and joy for any dwarf to have the thick mane she used to, impenetrable thick red hair flowing over her back, down to her waist. Now she’s cut it above her shoulders, so short she can barely form it into any hairdo. A soldier’s hair. A human’s hair. “He’s dead. I don’t regret it.”   
  
“You shouldn’t.” His hands are dry and calloused as he places them in hers - tentatively as if they both fear something will crack open if they touch again. “Like I said before, your father was ill with regret for sending you  away.”   
  
“As he should have been.”   
  
He nods, can’t tear his eyes away from the place where they touch, the small stretches of skin where his meet hers. It might be the last time again and he is strangely enough even less willing this time to tear himself away.    
  
“You could stay,” she says eventually though they both know he will not. That he is not that kind of man. In this moment he wishes he was.    
  
Instead Gorim lowers his head to kiss the back of her hand before he leaves.    
  
_ I will always love you, my lady _ and the words feel too meek against her calloused skin.    
  
  
  
*   
  
  
Redcliffe burns like the lava-washed streets of Orzammar.   
  
The darkening, gathering droves of their destruction floods the landscape and she fights her way through the hordes with Loghain by her side and the mages behind their backs, raising magic from the earth itself to keep them safe. Morrigan’s aggressive command of the elements in tune with Wynne’s strange spiritual powers that none of them understand the depths of.    
  
Sereda feels, perhaps for the first time since the Joining, how she is a Grey Warden for good or ill, how she belongs to the scant few sods that can actually turn the tide for this battle. It is the weight of the world but she can endure it. There is honour in it, even in the secrets the Orlesian warden reveals to them in his room later when the strategies have been made and the armies are informed.     
  
She nods solemnly at his strategy; she no longer fears her own death and neither does her new Warden, it seems.    
  
He’s a man of dignity, even now after the Landsmeet that must have stripped him of most of it. Dwarva-like and proud he stands there among them despite it all and Sereda seeks his company on the eve of battle. He seems to have expected it because he doesn’t mention it when she sits down by his side, serves him ale from her bottle and leans back, watching the flames in the fireplace. They cast a faint light at this hour.    
  
“A fine shield you got there,” he says eventually and nods towards Gorim’s gift. Her father’s gift. For a beat, the memories rise in her throat, threatening to flood her completely; she stares back into the fire. Exhales.    
  
“My father sent me to die in the Deep Roads.” Her boot gently nudges the Aeducan signet on the shield as she speaks, it’s like holding a hand against her own history. Her father’s embrace, her mother’s laughter, her brothers and their games. Gorim, Gorim, Gorim.    
  
Loghain clears his throat. “That sounds like a very...  _ dwarven  _ procedure.”    
  
Sereda glances up at her companion. Flashes of the Landsmeet surface - she had thought of Gorim the entire time, had looked to her side and almost expected to spot him there, ready to pick apart the arguments with her, sum up the monologues and the debates verging on civil war.  _ Send him across the border, exile the tyrant  _ but she would like to think that he had agreed with her about this man, at least.  __   
  
“My brother wanted me out of the way so he could seize the throne.” She downs her ale. “I suppose someone like you would know a lot about that sort of game.”    
  
Loghain raises an eyebrow, something akin to a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “I suppose I would, Warden.”   
  
“The final blow is mine to take,” she says later when the night settles in her body at long last. She must sleep even if it seems impossible. “Should Riordan fail.”   
  
She feels conviction rise in her body as she speaks the words; she walks out of the room and into her own where she sleeps, soundly and without darkspawn until Leliana knocks on the door to inform her that they must be travelling.   
  
  
  
  
*   
  
  
  
  
“Allow me,” Loghain says to her up on a rooftop with the sound of their destruction looming overhead. Everything is ashes, is fire and blood and Sereda has an injury on her leg that makes each step hurt so vividly she wants to seek death for that reason alone. Darkspawn infection, she thinks, though she is well aware it won’t kill her now that she has Joined. Well aware and almost  _ regretting _ . “I have done so many things wrong. Let me make this one thing right.”   
  
She pants, doubled over her shield for a moment’s rest.  _ Rest _ . One final blow and she could rest in the knowledge that she did her duty, that everything she has been forced to do since the exile has served a higher purpose. One last battle, one last victory. The glory of House Aeducan forever untarnished, far away from her brothers’   __ Ancestors help me, I’m so tired. 

“Ferelden needs you,” she protests but it’s weaker now, they both know it. She’s too tired for death whereas Loghain seems more alive than ever before, his face stern, his sword arm stronger than it had been at the Landsmeet, all of him sharp and focused on this one thing. Such a waste. 

“Ferelden needs a Warden-Commander.” He looks over his shoulder at the sound of something crashing down in the distance. More smoke swallows a building down there, on the streets where people run and where Gorim must be located; she thinks about his crooked leg and the unborn child that he might never meet.    
  
“No.” She shakes her head, though she no longer knows at what.   
  
Loghain’s hand is on her shoulder then and she leans into his embrace without looking into his eyes.   
  
“The smith will mourn you for the rest of his life,” he says and his voice is suddenly so soft that it might be someone else’s entirely or come from another time, a ghost moving swiftly between them. She wonders what that ghost has seen, what it has felt. Who it has loved beyond death. “Don’t do that to him when it’s unnecessary.”   
  
She blinks. 

Denerim falls apart around them and the dragon, the Archdemon with its low hissing voice that calls for her is pinned down now by Zevran’s daggers and Wynnes magic and Sereda looks at them with a grief that fills her throat and something else - a determined kind of pride, almost  _ joy  _ \- that washes it away as she nods.    
  
She nods and Loghain nods back. 

What feels like a lifetime later but is actually mere moments and she’s by his side again, holding her hands around his face that is pale and still.  _ Serene _ , perhaps, which feels odd since she just watched him collide with an Archdemon, his soul battling its darkness, drowning it in the light she had barely guessed was there. His heart beats slow and faint, the rhythm of it spreads into her own body like the taint they share reach out for others, seeks its kin. 

  
“Atrast nal tunsha,” she whispers. “May your ancestors guide you home.”

 

  
  


* * *

 

  
  
  
When the hordes hit the city he had expected them all to flee. Had imagined himself taking his family and make it to temporary safety somewhere out in the wilds where they could be forgotten for a while but once they realise that the darkspawn are coming for them, something inside him had snapped back into place.    
  
“Arm yourselves,” he shouts at Orrin and Brita and hands them swords, bows and daggers. “Keep a distance, don’t let them get too close. Don’t be stupid, if they overwhelm you -  _ run _ !”   
  
An apostate joins them outside the flats where they live -  _ lived _ , he remind himself, the house had burned to the ground in one of the first waves - and then several mercenaries. Two noblewomen are the last to join their band of misfits, he hands them bows but one of them - short, fat and furious - grabs a greatsword with a groan that reminds him of an animal.  _ Bastards killed my sister, I’ll fight to the death.  _   
  
“Flank them,” Gorim instructs with the voice of the man he used to be. The knight of Orzammar who is once again roaring in his blood, aiming for survival, for  _ not giving them an inch of our home _ . His leg is crooked and his sword arm rusty but he’s still a warrior at heart. “We corner them. Go for the archers.”

“Gorim.” Dara stands beside her father, her eyes narrow and frightened. She wants a smith, not a warrior but his caste is more present in him than he would ever have guessed and it’s not the right moment to debate it now with the invaders at the gate. “Please be careful.”   
  
“Aye.” He nods. Wants to give her more but he can’t. Not yet.    
  
  
  


* * *

  
  


“So you’re a noble now, Gorim. And a free man.”   
  
It had taken her breath away at first, watching him stand there during the ceremony the Queen of Ferelden had insisted on having. To honour the fallen and celebrate the living. Sereda wonders if it’s a little bit more of the first rather than the latter. She’s not one to blame anyone for that.    
  
Not one to blame anyone for a lot of things, any more. The exile has washed away certain flaws while magnifying others, this she is certain of tonight. What is left in her is a sort of neutral ground, a vast field of grey incredibly fitting for a Warden-Commander.    
  
“I can’t believe we got out of it alive,” he says, his expression shifting slightly. “Well, that I did. You - there were never any doubts about you, my lady.”   
  
Sereda thinks about Loghain and her own raised sword. About the dead littering the streets of Denerim, of Redcliffe, of Orzammar. They will walk upon the ghosts of the fallen for years to come.    
  
They take seats by the fire in what appears to be a spare sitting room not far from the great hall where the ale still flows like a lava stream and the chatter is bright and brittle. Disbelief, she reckons. Disbelief and relief tangled into one red-hot sense of being  _ alive _ . It flutters in her chest as well, if less prominent and shaded by memories of loss. So many layers of loss and devastation; she can barely get through them if she lets herself be overwhelmed.    
  
So she doesn’t.    
  
“We’ve both been pardoned and are free to return to Orzammar,” he says, suddenly. “I, er, I am also reinstated as your second. If you want me. I came to tell you that.”   
  
“Oh.” It feels like the stones beneath her shift. “Oh, Gorim.”   
  
He nods and there’s a flicker of something in his eyes. Hope, perhaps. Or fear that she will take him up on his offer.  _ Once a manservant, always a manservant _ and the weight of their ancestors is suffocating them both. Once they were little more than children chasing after dreams, clashing against the harsh surface beneath, the stony walls around. Squashed, like sodding nugs under rocks. She no longer misses it, perhaps she never did. Perhaps it is simpler for him to miss something he never truly had than it is for her to long for what she deserved, what was given to her. Such abundance of everything down there but she was insatiable nonetheless.    
  
The surface has humbled her, she feels it like a beat in her legs, a rhythm in her chest.    
  
“I don’t think I’m going back,” she says eventually; the decision forms along with the words. Spills out of her. “The surface needs Grey Wardens. Can’t leave it all to the humans.”    
  
He smiles at that, quickly and tinged with a sadness that she can’t bear to see in him.  _ There is no finer man than you.   _ Sereda leans closer to him, so near now that they are touching each other in their seats and the rush of blood though her body, the twists of memories in her chest. Glancing sideways she catches his gaze. Her hand finds the small of his back.    
  
Gorim clears his throat.  __   
  
“If you change your mind, let me know.” Neither of them move. “I might be going back there to put the house in order, at least.”   
  
“You should do that,” she says; she has always assumed she’d want to return in a blaze of triumph though now that the moment is finally here there’s nothing.  _ Nothing _ . “If you want to. It’s your House now.”   
  
“Ours, my lady.”   
  
__ It’s the same thing.    
  
Her hand brushes over his broad frame, tracing new scars she will never learn the history behind, the old spots she know as well as her own. Even though she cannot se them through his clothes she knows they are there.    
  
His shoulders are slumped where he sits but he straightens up. There is no part of her that doesn’t want him; there is no part of her that doesn’t want to send him back to his wife.    
  
“If things had been different-” He sighs, cuts himself off. “If I had thought I’d meet you again.”   
  
“I know.”   
  
“My feelings for you are the same as they ever were.”   
  
She smiles a little. “That I’m a hopeless arrogant sod but also the Paragon of Beauty?”   
  
He returns the smile but his is sadder, less of an instinct and more of an effort, as he rises to his feet. “That’s it. Roughly.”   
  
They could go back to Orzammar together, of course they could. Share the journey, travel the long road back to where they belong except that she doesn’t, can’t even fathom how everything she has seen would fit under the heavy sky made of stone.    
  
“Go home to your family, Gorim.” She’s still sitting, watching him leave slowly, as though he’s removing himself bit by bit from whatever story that has framed them both. “Take care of them.”   
  
Another nod, another step towards the door.     
  
They shape and reshape, form themselves around their surroundings, their oaths. Sereda locks their gazes as she, too, rises to her feet but remains where she is. Gorim turns on his heel and walks away and she’s uncertain if he even hears her last words to him.     
  
“I will be with you, as always. My lord.”

  
  



End file.
